parked in the staff lot of Clevinger Hospital and lit one more cigarette. She stayed in her car, watching Psychiatric Unit Number Three, known as Three-Psych.
This was a flat I-shaped building at the center of the hospital’s grounds. It had an asphalt courtyard surrounded by a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence, topped with turned-in iron spikes and strung with razor-wire. In the corners, video cameras perched like vultures on high stalks. There was a single basketball hoop with no net, and a worn heavy punching bag hung on a welded chain.
Several men were standing inside the fence smoking or pacing, or talking to each other or tono one visible. Even from that distance, there was something unsettling about the way they moved.
These were me NGIs: at any given time, eight to ten men on-ward who had killed or seriously injured others, had been found by the courts Not Guilty by reason of Insanity and been recommended for psychiatric treatment instead of regular prison. The program here was known as JCOG: the Jephson Cognitive Therapy for Management of Psychotically Violent Behavior at Clevinger Memorial Hospital.
Almost all the JCOG inmates had lengthy records, with several stays in prisons or institutions before new psychiatric evaluations triggered the NGI ruling. Roughly eleven percent washed out within the first weeks. Most of the rest achieved stability, enforced by combinations of Haldol, Ativan, Clozapine, and lithium, with an average stay of twenty-two months, dien were released as rehabilitated.
From her car, Alison could identify most of them: Perez, Holger, Odum—aggravated assault, child abuse, manslaughter. The fourth NGI was a good-looking man with dark spiky hair, wearing gray hospital pajamas: John James Garlick, soon to be released. Garlick was standing well apart from the others, talking to someone his body was blocking. She could not see who it was.
She got out of the car and started up the walk. Except for Three-Psych’s razor-wire fence and apatrolling security car, the hospital could have been an aging junior college: three acres of grassy hillside with half a dozen unattractive, functional buildings surrounding the original brick structure. The afternoon was heavy with clouds, but flashes of sunlight brightened the old brick. She wondered what the philanthropist founder, turn-of-the-century
grande dame
Edith Clevinger, would think of her pretty hospital now.
Alison unlocked the main door to Three-Psych and walked down the hall to the courtyard’s inside entrance, stopping in the doorway.
By chance or instinct, Garlick swiveled with feral speed. His eyes were already focused when they met hers, hard as a stag beetle’s shell, seeming able to pierce her thoughts and perhaps her very being. Two seconds later his gaze moved on as if the contact had never happened, leaving a faint chill, as if something had been taken away.
The man he was talking to stepped aside, a hasty move that had a guilty appearance. She could see who it was now.
Dr. Francis Jephson.
Jephson said something more to Garlick, then crossed the courtyard to where she stood. He wore an expensive gray wool suit, an ecru shirt with cufflinks, and gold-rimmed glasses over pale blue eyes.
“Alison. Could you wander by my office in a few minutes?”
“Of course, Doctor.”
“We do need to talk.” It seemed to her that he emphasized the word
do
ominously.
She nodded and watched him leave: slim, balanced, moving with an athletic stride. He had been a distance runner at Cambridge and still trained with exacting discipline.
Garlick had moved to the courtyard’s far end, a lone figure staring out through the fence at the freedom which, in a few weeks, would be his.
Garlick, who had arrived twenty months earlier from the maximum security facility at Atascadero, along with a detailed report on the incident that had landed him there: gripping his girlfriend by the hair and repeatedly ramming her face into a bathroom sink until a sliver
This was a flat I-shaped building at the center of the hospital’s grounds. It had an asphalt courtyard surrounded by a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence, topped with turned-in iron spikes and strung with razor-wire. In the corners, video cameras perched like vultures on high stalks. There was a single basketball hoop with no net, and a worn heavy punching bag hung on a welded chain.
Several men were standing inside the fence smoking or pacing, or talking to each other or tono one visible. Even from that distance, there was something unsettling about the way they moved.
These were me NGIs: at any given time, eight to ten men on-ward who had killed or seriously injured others, had been found by the courts Not Guilty by reason of Insanity and been recommended for psychiatric treatment instead of regular prison. The program here was known as JCOG: the Jephson Cognitive Therapy for Management of Psychotically Violent Behavior at Clevinger Memorial Hospital.
Almost all the JCOG inmates had lengthy records, with several stays in prisons or institutions before new psychiatric evaluations triggered the NGI ruling. Roughly eleven percent washed out within the first weeks. Most of the rest achieved stability, enforced by combinations of Haldol, Ativan, Clozapine, and lithium, with an average stay of twenty-two months, dien were released as rehabilitated.
From her car, Alison could identify most of them: Perez, Holger, Odum—aggravated assault, child abuse, manslaughter. The fourth NGI was a good-looking man with dark spiky hair, wearing gray hospital pajamas: John James Garlick, soon to be released. Garlick was standing well apart from the others, talking to someone his body was blocking. She could not see who it was.
She got out of the car and started up the walk. Except for Three-Psych’s razor-wire fence and apatrolling security car, the hospital could have been an aging junior college: three acres of grassy hillside with half a dozen unattractive, functional buildings surrounding the original brick structure. The afternoon was heavy with clouds, but flashes of sunlight brightened the old brick. She wondered what the philanthropist founder, turn-of-the-century
grande dame
Edith Clevinger, would think of her pretty hospital now.
Alison unlocked the main door to Three-Psych and walked down the hall to the courtyard’s inside entrance, stopping in the doorway.
By chance or instinct, Garlick swiveled with feral speed. His eyes were already focused when they met hers, hard as a stag beetle’s shell, seeming able to pierce her thoughts and perhaps her very being. Two seconds later his gaze moved on as if the contact had never happened, leaving a faint chill, as if something had been taken away.
The man he was talking to stepped aside, a hasty move that had a guilty appearance. She could see who it was now.
Dr. Francis Jephson.
Jephson said something more to Garlick, then crossed the courtyard to where she stood. He wore an expensive gray wool suit, an ecru shirt with cufflinks, and gold-rimmed glasses over pale blue eyes.
“Alison. Could you wander by my office in a few minutes?”
“Of course, Doctor.”
“We do need to talk.” It seemed to her that he emphasized the word
do
ominously.
She nodded and watched him leave: slim, balanced, moving with an athletic stride. He had been a distance runner at Cambridge and still trained with exacting discipline.
Garlick had moved to the courtyard’s far end, a lone figure staring out through the fence at the freedom which, in a few weeks, would be his.
Garlick, who had arrived twenty months earlier from the maximum security facility at Atascadero, along with a detailed report on the incident that had landed him there: gripping his girlfriend by the hair and repeatedly ramming her face into a bathroom sink until a sliver
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